Month: July 2023

Thorn West: Issue No. 167

State Politics

• A statewide public ballot measure to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act has qualified for the 2024 ballot. If the measure succeeds, it would allow local municipalities to expand rent control locally; Costa-Hawkins, as state law, dramatically restricts municipalities’ ability to do so.

• Have an opinion on currently proposed statewide legislation? California DSA invites DSA members to recommend legislative endorsements, both in support and in opposition.

City Politics

• Protesters briefly shut down a meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, to demand the closure of Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, where conditions are inhumane. Los Padrinos was recently reopened only after two other juvenile facilities were ordered to close by the state due to unsuitable conditions.

Health Care

• California is experiencing an uptick in cases of COVID-19.

• Premiums for health insurance sold through the Covered California marketplace will increase by nearly 10% next year, the highest rate hike since 2018.

• In-N-Out Burger recently announced a policy to prohibit its workers from wearing face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but California regulations prevent them from implementing it here.

Labor

• At a rally this Tuesday, striking WGA workers will deliver a petition with over 25,000 signatures demanding justice from NBCUniversal, which has attempted to thwart picketers by closing down sidewalks and has repeatedly ignored instructions from the city to install pedestrian protections. Details here!

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The Los Angeles city controller’s office has released a database of all LAPD arrests from the last four years, searchable by race, geographic area, and type of arrest. Among the audit’s findings were that Black and brown people were disproportionately the target of arrests.

• Streetsblog LA thoroughly documents the outrageous contradictions between a report from LAPD Chief Michel Moore on an incident last year in which an officer shot an unarmed man and bodycam footage of the same incident.

Transportation

• Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass took over as chair of Metro for the upcoming year. At her first meeting as chair, a coalition of activists anchored by ACT-LA, and supported by DSA-LA, rallied in support of fare-free public transit.

Housing Rights

• Tenant protections enacted in response to COVID-19 gave many tenants until August 1 to pay off rent debt accrued between March 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021. With that deadline now here, many anticipate a wave of evictions. For anyone with concerns about tenant protections moving forward, Councilmember Nithya Raman published a breakdown of rights, protections, and requirements on Instagram, as well as in a subsequent bulletin jointly released with Mayor Bass.

• A lawsuit initiated by the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles aims to immediately end the freeze on rental increases that applies to LA rental housing currently subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance. The rent freeze on RSO units will expire on February 2024 even if the lawsuit is unsuccessful. Currently, this ren freeze is the only thing legally preventing rental increases as high as 8.8%. The maximum allowable increase has recently spiked because it’s indexed to inflation.

Environmental Justice

• CalMatters breaks down the battle between Big Oil and environmentalists over a law that bans new oil and gas wells near homes and schools. Though Governor Gavin Newsom signed the law last year, it’s been on hold since oil companies qualified a measure for the November 2024 ballot that would overturn it.

• A heat wave continues across Southern California, during a July that may be the hottest month in recorded history.

Thorn West: Issue No. 166

Labor

• Jacobin covers the first week of the SAG-AFTRA strike. SAG-AFTRA has released a negotiation status report showing in detail how little the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has been willing to give. Mayor Karen Bass, after a much-derided initial statement calling on “all sides to come to the table,” released a second statement expressing support for striking workers.

• Members of striking unions including the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and UNITE HERE attended a Teamster rally and picket on Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles. Some 340,000 Teamster drivers and warehouse workers are poised to go on a nationwide strike against UPS if they cannot come to terms on a contract before August 1.

• In further “this is all one struggle” news, NBCUniversal recently pruned the trees outside their studio, removing shade from picket lines — only a week after LAPD communications revealed a plot to remove a tree that provided shade to an encampment. Universal has been fined $250 by the city for trimming trees without a permit. SAG-AFTRA and the WGA have filed unfair labor practices charges.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Knock-LA has published the results of an intensive survey of every time Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies have fired a weapon at a person.

• Local media once again chose to validate the strange and incorrect belief, seemingly prevalent among police officers, that simple exposure to certain narcotics is a health risk, after several LAPD officers were taken to the hospital for “meth exposure.”

Incarceration

• Starting on October 1, Los Angeles County will all but eliminate the use of cash bail for defendants accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies. Before this announcement, the use of cash bail had already been paused, as a result of a lawsuit. The decision comes as the public has become increasingly aware of decrepit and unsafe conditions of LA County jails.

Environmental Justice

• Southern California is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. LA Public Press covers the annual shortcomings of Los Angeles’ system of cooling centers, which in the neighborhood of Skid Row has only gotten worse.

• California’s three largest electric utilities have proposed a plan to charge customers not just for how much energy they use but also based on their household income. Their proposal is designed to accommodate a new law to make energy less costly for California’s lowest-income customers.

• An experiment in Pacoima applied “cool paint” to 10 square blocks of streets. One year later, the results have shown temperatures that are 10 degrees cooler than regular asphalt.